We’ve negotiated the rights with Darryl Keck to make his blockbuster Xtags book freely available, Xtags Maximized. The book has over 200 pages in 9 chapters, diving both deep and wide into using Xtags for serious production work.

You can download the book from the link above, or from the sidebar on this page and the Xtags product page.

Even though it’s some years old now, and written for Xtags for QuarkXPress, the book is still fairly accurate, since the features described haven’t changed. (Xtags certainly has had new features added since then, which you can explore using the release history links found in the download sidebar elements on this page.) The book also generally applies to Xtags for InDesign, since we try to keep the two versions working as closely as humanly possible.

To paraphrase an old proverb about justice, “the wheels of Em Software development turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

It’s been a very long time since we’ve released any news about our XTensions for QuarkXPress 10 under Mac OS X—the Windows port was done mid-last-year—, mostly because we had no good news to share. We’re a small 4-man company, severely engineering-resource-limited (there’s really only one engineer who could do the work, Chris Roueche). The QuarkXPress 10 Mac OS XTension porting work loomed as a mountain we couldn’t really start climbing until we had cleared away some major obligations (the ports involved converting all code from Carbon to Cocoa, which is a serious change). We kept having to make tough engineering resource decisions over the past year that we judged the best for our customers overall. The end result of those decisions was a major delay affecting some of our QuarkXPress customers, and we’re sorry for that.

Chris was able to start the porting work in earnest this year, and so we’re very happy to show concrete porting progress in the release of Xtags 3.8.4 for QuarkXPress 10 under OS X.

Our current best estimate is that Xdata for QuarkXPress 10 OS X will be available by mid-March, with Xcatalog (the largest of the ports, due to its relatively large user interface) to follow a few weeks later.

The good news is that, once these ports are done, there shouldn’t be any more serious mountains to climb for future releases of QuarkXPress.

As a case in point, we’re also simultaneously producing versions of these XTensions for QuarkXPress 2015, which is due in late March, according to Quark. If you’d like to test our prerelease versions of Xtags—and perhaps Xdata if we hit our target—under the QuarkXPress 2015 beta, please contact support, and we’ll put you in touch with the Quark 2015 beta test folks (who will require you to join their beta program under NDA, so only ask if you’re serious).

With this release of Xtags, we are pleased (and relieved!) to announce the addition of full support for QuarkXPress 10 on Mac OS X. Please note that with this release, our QuarkXPress 10 XTensions now require QuarkXPress 10.2 or later (both Mac OS X and Windows).

Pat Bensky of CatBase fame, describes how Xtags works with CatBase to produce imoderni‘s catalogs. (Also see the CatBase case study for Kellogs for another application of Xtags Pro.)

The entire document was built automatically, with minimal intervention from the user, telling InDesign to create the table of contents, for example.

(Click on the graphic to see the full pdf.)

The data is maintained in CatBase. This includes all the details, picture names and sizes, etc.

The customer selects which products to publish (e.g., all products for one manufacturer, as in the attached example; all products of a certain type, such as sofas; all products that a certain dealer sells; all products in a certain collection; etc.).

Mark Jockin, CEO of Pre1 Software in Portland, Oregon explains how Em Software’s Xtags product became a backbone of the Pre1 newspaper software sold to hundreds of publications across the Americas.

In 1999, Pre1 first sold its newspaper software to an alternative newsweekly in Portland, Oregon. Today, more than 400 titles are printed using Pre1’s SmartPublisher, with more coming online each month. By now, literally millions of ads have been converted into print. Xtags made it all possible.

Pre1’s mission is to streamline workflow for publications by integrating into one product multiple business processes vital to newspaper and magazine publishers. For the most part, every publication works the same. The sales reps sell ads, the accountants collect money, and the production department builds the ads. When deciding how to unite these various disciplines in a single software product for newspapers and magazines, Pre1’s challenge was which technologies to count on to get the job done.

Quark announced recently that QuarkXPress 9 is set to ship on April 26th (later this month), with a “test drive” version available until then on the Quark web site.

We’re delighted to announce that the 9.x versions of our XTensions–compatible with the final QuarkXPress 9 release–are now available from the right sidebar of this post, and from the respective product pages.

This version of QuarkXPress looks to have a tremendous set of new features and improvements, and should be a must-have upgrade for anyone who wants to build e-books or make mobile apps from QuarkXPress content. This new version also catches up to its main competitor in various ways: conditional styles, bullets and numbering, callouts, story editing, etc.

One of the new features of QuarkXPress 9 that greatly improves our products is the new anchored-table-breaking ability. This means you’ll be able to create anchored tables in Xdata that break automatically over column or page boundaries.

Here and here are a couple of articles from the University of Kent CMS blog, providing a brief overview of how they use Xtags to drive printed output in a Drupal environment, and their experience with the process.

There’s a great article on Xtags here, on the DPCI (Database Publishing Consultants, Inc.) website.

It covers a bit of history, the target audience for Xtags, gives a simple workflow example, and then talks about using the same tags for InDesign as for QuarkXPress, and the issues you might encounter.

Since we forgot to include documentation for one major new feature in our original release notes for Xtags 6/7 for InDesign CS4/CS5 (now fixed), we thought we should call attention to it separately: Xtags now boasts new tags for hyperlinks, cross-references and text anchors. See the updated release notes.

These tags have long been requested, and we’re glad to finally deliver them with this release. Let us know how they work for you.

This release of Xtags for InDesign adds support for InDesign CS5 to that for CS4 (dropping support for CS2/CS3), adds tags for hyperlinks, cross-references and text anchors, adds support for Xtags import and export through the standard InDesign place/export dialogs as well as drag’n’drop, for above-line and custom positioning of anchored frames, for anchored frame position locking, and improves missing picture handling.

This release of Xtags for InDesign adds standard white and black color names for XPress cross-compatibility, and adds more intelligent handling of non-style-applying @ characters in text (e.g., as used for email addresses).

(This release includes all release notes back to the beginning of the CS2/CS3/CS4 series.)

This set of releases includes a whole slew of bug fixes and adds many features, including additional picture box runaround type support, box placement relative to another named box, PDF page and cropping support on import, Unicode import/export in XPress 7, support for layers on box creation, and much more.